Guild Wars 2

In SWTOR there was a separate data flag called something like “isFlurryAttack” which determined whether the attack displayed as an aggregate damage amount, or individual.

I’m guessing ANet either assigned a similar designation per ability, or the aggregate display is a function of how “spammy” the ability is (for example, Scepter’s confusion beam ticks somewhat slowly compared to the “flurry”-ish attacks).

Well, it’s really up to you and what you like.

However, the teleport does not work for jump puzzles. Blink will not allow the Mesmer to traverse over “impassable terrain” like empty air, so you cannot Blink from one platform to another in the vast majority of cases.

But it’s such a kitten to remember to charge MoP all the time.

I still find it hilarious that there’s an actual discussion on something that’s pretty obvious when you play the class in game and pay any attention to the numbers.

if my sword #2 only did 1.2kish and my iD another 1.2k, that would mean my highest burst combination should only tickle an opponent and be barely noticeable, which is just not the case.

The numbers I posted above in this thread are non-crit numbers on the heavy armor golem. If you’re using the build I assume you’re using, you’ll have a 50%+ crit rate, with resulting ~3k Blurred Frenzy and 2k iD on a glass thief/elementalist, with bonus Sharper Images procs for about 600 damage over 5 seconds. Those classes also have rather low base HP, so a full combo would do around 6k, which is about half their glass cannon health.

A 6300 iD attack (using incorrect damage numbers) non-crit on a heavy armor golem would do over 11k damage on said thief/elementalist, which is what Hundred Blades does in a full glass cannon build, lolol.

Well, your traits kind of define your build. You should build your traits based on the actual traits you get, and not the stats accrued for the most part. What I meant is that your trait build can include things like “your phantasm gives you regen” and “regen gives you protection”. This makes you more durable, regardless of your actual stats.

The only key stats you get from traits are the percentage ones — crit damage, condition duration, boon duration, and shatter cooldown reduction. These are harder to get from gear. General stats like power, vit … gear contributes roughly 3x the stats that any trait line will give you.

So build your traits, then decide on “how tanky” or “how glassy” you want to be with your gear.

As I said, I would generally get gear with an even split of power, condition damage, precision, and vitality. This measure of vitality is the only “tankiness” I would include.

Shrug, measure iDuelist’s damage on the dummy. Guess I shouldn’t have said “all multi-hit attacks”.

Edit: To clarify, get low precision so the damage can be more easily observed on the dummy.

iW, iB, iD function in this way. I know Ranger volley attacks function in that manner, as well as Warrior HB.

Edit2: You could also try Blurred Frenzy.

Nikijih.1075:

Do you have a source to back that up or is that just pure conjecture? Been trying to research it and nothing of the sorts comes up.

Well … if the damage numbers were separate, then iDuelist would 1/2-shot enemy players in PvP and there were be about 847 threads crying about it in this forum. iDuelist would also do more tooltip damage than Hundred Blades.

Oh, and iWarden would be able to kill siege units in 1 attack. That would be sweet.

Edit: Generally speaking it’s pretty obvious if you watch your target’s healthbar and use different attacks.

My main question what, if any, works well, and how much of a difference is there?

A somewhat significant difference.

If I am specced with Healing/Vit/Toughness only, will I be doing 20% less damage? 50% less? 80% less?

An extreme Heal/Vit/Tough gearing will drop your damage output by about 30-40%. 20% in raw damage (power for example), and an additional 10-20% from multipliers and scalers (crit%, crit damage).

Note though that a lot of a build’s “survivability” comes from the traits and weapon/utility selection.

If I were to make a single gear set that is generally effective for most builds, I would simply copy the sPvP Celestial amulet (even in all stats), or gear yourself with a balance of Carrion (Power, Vit, COND) and Rampager (CRIT, power, vit, cond). Carrion + Rampager is probably better. In other words, an even mix of Power, Precision, Vitality, and Condition damage.

There are a few rarer builds that are good for Torch. Specifically a non-crit% (Sharper Images) Condition/Shatter build.

I find it to be the best offhand for the build actually, although I would really like the burn and blind swapped …

GS is easily the best PvE weapon, best general use weapon, andkittennear the best WvW weapon a Mesmer has.

I would recommend power to level with. Condition damage is not really as effective for Mesmers at low levels (basically requires level 45+ to make a more viable condition build with SI and bleeds, and becomes much more “whole” at level 50+).

1. Chaotic Transferecne is a very marginal ability and I would avoid it in general unless you are going for a 30 point trait.

2. I highly recommend you select a second weapon set. Mesmers, and all classes, are much more powerful when swapping between two weapon sets.

3. For WvW, I generally recommend Blink over Decoy. Personally I take both, but if you have to choose between the two, Blink will enable you to avoid much more damage and escape more effectively.

First of all: no, just no. Phantasm duelist alone deals that much damage per hit, and hits x8 (if i remember correctly, might be x6). Saying Phantasms deal 1400 dmg every 6 seconds is borderline dishonest.

I suggest you go to the Mist, right now, and pick up a Berserker amulet. Invest fully into Domination, along with the 15% illusion damage trait. Your iDuelist will do approximately 1400 damage, non-crit, to the heavy armor golem. Sit down.

You may be one of the poor players that are adding up each damage number you see from iDuelist as if they were separate. This is not the case. For multi-hit attacks, the game displays the accumulated damage. For example, if your iDuelist volley looks like:

175 350 525 700 875 1050 1225 1400

Then iD did 1400 damage. Not 1400+whatever. The game displays and refreshes the total damage of the multi-hit attack. This is likely a UI evolution/adaptation from SWTOR, WAR, Rift, and certain WoW UI mods where this display mechanism was introduced.

Second: Shatter skills do have a heafty time to execute: whatever time is required to summon three clones. Thats your casting time for Shatter. Sure, it can be used on the fly… but it requires setup, making it hardly instant.

What matters in this discussion is the additional time the player invests in order to execute one or another of the options.

In general Good Mesmer Gameplay, you will be spawning clones and phantasms all the time. Shattering requires 0 additional time. It also requires no additional resources (the context we are discussing includes superfluous illusions that are being generated). Summoning a phantasm requires the time execution of a specific ability. It also requires the maintenance of exactly 3 phantasms.

I didnt say it was additive, I was just naming the various bonuses and adding a + as a way to mean that you stack all three.

If it is not additive, then they do not stack with any special result than if you had the 3×3% trait alone. In other words there is no synergy. You may as well throw on some toughness and call it synergy.

Also: phantasms have more hp then clones. Not sure how you got that clones were sturdier, but thats pure non-sens…

Clone HP was buffed in a late stress test by 50%. Observe how many hits it takes for your phantasms to die compared to your clones. In my experience with only casual observation, my clones have generally always taken more hits to die than my phantasms in PvE (where I have something approaching a consistent and observable damage intake).

Your claim that a single Mirror Blade does more direct damage then a phantasm is mindblowingly wrong. Its like you are playing a different game then the rest of us… FYI, Mirror Blade does about half the damage of a single Illusionary Berserker pass.
Now can you please stop spreading misinformation?

Lol. A correctly traited mirror blade deals around 1600 damage non-crit, and adds 9% vulnerability (target takes more damage) and 6 stacks of might (210 power and 210 cdmg) in a 1v1.

Look, not trying to be rude here, but you have a long ways to go.

Kelesti.2458:

EasymodeX.4062:

You are wrong.

That aside, GS is an excellent weapon.

Running with Multiple Phantasms means that you’re not shattering on cooldown, which means if you need an emergency daze or distortion (or even a heal) immediately after, you don’t have to wait to resummon clones to get one off.

Give a Power Build, triple Phantasms offer much more damage than triple-clone Mind Wracking on cooldown (even if you can manage to pull that off). Have you been ignoring how hard the Berserker shreds? The Duelist? The Swordsman itself is pretty solid. 3 Warlocks that don’t need you to manage your debuffs (because they’re already up there, EDEs) will outdamage two Phase Retreat clones that hope they can put up Burning on RNG. So nope, not really wrong here.

It’s certainly a subjective thing to say you don’t like the playstyle, it’s another to address my point as false, without backing it up (because you can’t).

1. You are making a random assumption that a player would use Diversion and Distortion on cooldown. Said player would be an idiot. You are projecting your own habits on said player. QED.

2. There is no such thing as a triple-clone Mind Wracking on cooldown build. Any intelligent shatter build will utilize phantasms along with clones.

3. The Swordsman does more power-centric DPS than the Duelist which does more damage than the Berserker.

4. Unlike inferior players, I actually utilize the phantasm damage concurrent with shatters. Therefore, the comparison is:

(a) 3 Phantasms versus
(b) 2 Phantasms, 3-4 Mind Wracks, 3-4 stacks of confusion, 12-13 stacks of vulnerability, Mirror Blade every 4.8 seconds, 6 stacks of Might, and a partridge in a pear tree

This comparison is pretty one-sided.

Nikijih.1075:

1) Phantasms when traited deal more damage then anything else you can throw out. Saving 1 phantasm spot for skills like Decoy or Illusionary Leap would most definitly be a huge damage loss.

Phantasms generally deal 1150-1400 damage to a dummy every 6 seconds, assuming they stay alive, without traits, non-crit. They use up a sustained resource (illusion cap) and require the ability execution to create them. In PvP, they can be dodged, kited, blinded, killed separately from the player (or more importantly, you have little control over ensuring the attacks land).

Mind Wrack generally deals 1200 damage expending illusions, and requires no actual time to execute. It is “added damage”, as well as AOE. In many common builds, you automatically get at least a few stacks of confusion in the package as well, for an additional 400 damage in normal scenarios.

2) Phantasms work best in combination with the Illusionary Defender utility skill, as it stacks nicely with the boon trait combos (50% + 33% + 9% damage reduction). What this means is that you usually have 2 offensive and 1 defensive phantasms out at the same time and can summon all three at the same time.

Unless you have evidence support the additive damage reduction, I am assuming you are assuming, which makes it dubious since additive percentage damage reduction is a bad mechanic in general.

However, damage reduction stacking aside, your core statement that the approach synergizes with phantasms is incorrect: Phantasms have less durability than clones. Therefore, the damage reduction stacking actually works better with clones, not phantasms.

Clone abilities are not nearly as powerfull as phantasm abilities right now, be it offensively or defensively. If you spec Phantasms, they can still be used for complementary utility, but in no circumstance will you ever want to give up 1 phantasm for a Decoy or a Leap. The best use for them is before putting all phantasms up, right after a shatter or if your phantasms are killed before their CD is up.

Decoy or Leap? I was thinking of dropping a Mirror Blade that does more direct damage than a Phantasm attack, not including the 6 stacks of Might or vulnerability which will carry over to future attacks. Along with the clone, whose shatter is worth a decent fraction of a Phantasm’s damage.

Then you have Staff2, which doubles as a leap finisher to pick up fire shield or chaos shield, or other useful effects, but also generates a clone. You also have Sword4 and Scepter2, which offer very high damage (as much as a phantasm attack) along with the block.

Meanwhile Shatters are still good, but you want to time it so you can resummon phantasms right after.

Indeed, exactly as I said in my prior post.

Separately:

My weakest phantasm, the berserker does about 6-10k for 1 burst, my strongest does 35-45k(focus), my duelist does 20-30k and the swordsman is realyl weak and only does around 3k damage.

Learn to read your UI and revise your understanding of how much damage your phantasms are doing.

Kelesti.2458:

You can, and should, be running 3 Phantasms whenever possible.

You are wrong.

That aside, GS is an excellent weapon.

I think ANet’s approach is to make all tools lackluster unless you trait for them — clones, phantasms, and shatters.

To be honest, a phantasm without traits is not extraordinarily effective.

Keep in mind that shatters, as a mechanic, are completely parallel to general class execution — e.g. all shatter damage/utility is on top of and concurrent with everything else you’re normally doing.

Is this conclusion perceived or is there hard data supporting this conclusion?

Both.

Phantasms are very strong, however they are slightly overrated. They are pretty easy fire-and-forget mechanisms, but they are not exclusive with shattering.

Many players like to use their phantasms, and then summon more and pretend they are a squad of 3 pets. This is their initial error. Then they pick up 10 traits to buff phantasms, and they turn their error into reality: phantasms are too good to shatter [in a phantasm build with 4+ traits invested into phantasms living].

What most novice players miss, and you can see evidence of this in the “wah, my clones are overwriting my third phantasm!” threads, is that you can time your shatters and weapon swaps effectively to maintain very high phantasm uptime.

The constraints are thus:

1. You can maintain only 3 illusions regardless.
2. Your third phantasm constrains your clone abilities (clones will overwrite a third phantasm).
3. Two phantasms seems like a high point for effectiveness, to enable you to maintain your clone generation on cooldown.

4. You can summon two phantasms almost at the same time using a weapon swap.
5. With coherent timing, you can replace both phantasms that you have up immediately after shattering.
6. By maintaining a target of 2 phantasms, you can freely unload clone abilities without impacting your DPS target

This holds true for most builds in general unless, as I said, you have a build which is 100% centered on phantasms (+30% phantasm damage, retal, regen, prot on phantasms, phantasm recharge, SI). Naturally, this is a popular build because of its passive and generally easy play.

Carighan.6758:

Hrm, not sure how I feel about this. Without that jerk, it’d be absolutely trivial to follow the “real” Mesmer around. With the random mini-movement, it’s not entirely trivial at least. Sometimes people go for the clone with the first attack after getting blocked, simply because they can’t immediately see 0,2s after which is the real one.

I mostly play WvW, so my situations when using this ability tend to center on running away from 5+ players. In that situation, I strongly prefer not to lose distance while still employing the defensive block effect. In those situations the deceptive effect of the clone is nil.

To consider the following situations:

1. Block while moving. In this event, your clone will not move, and will proceed to turn around and autoattack your opponent. Any opponent of decent skill will already know that it’s a clone and that the real Mesmer is actually running. Any dumb opponent will tend to continue to attack the moving opponent. Either way, the stutter is ineffective for a moving Mesmer.

2. Block while standing. In this event, it will do as you say and create some degree of deception.

Hmm, don’t see any immediate way of meeting both requirements unfortunately.

Damage and damage scaling (or relative damage) on the damage-on-interruption trait.

Also you may want to clarify that it is the Mantra secondary abilities that are instant, not the charge. Makes sense to everyone that’s used Mantras but …

May want to clarify that the cooldown not updating when you have the weapon trait and illusion traits at the sametime is a known bug, and both traits are working as intended. It’s a common misunderstanding.

May want to have a short section on duration versus intensity stacking of conditions, and that effects like Daze to not stack.

I find GS to be the most all-around useful weapon in general.

I find Sword to be the only mainhand weapon I tend to use.

Best:

- No comment, don’t particularly care to get things nerfed.

Worst:

1. Scepter2 / Sword4. The block -> clone abilities.

I find these to be problematic due to the player stagger that occurs when the clone is summoned on block. Typically, I like to move in a certain direction while blocking. When the block activates, the player is jerked in another direction (seems like to the side) for a second. This is typically what I do NOT want to happen when I am blocking and it makes those abilities very dubious to use in practice and simply jarring in general.

2. Prestige

Prestige is great, but as suggested elsewhere, the burn and blind effects should be reversed. This would significantly increase the smoothness of the ability for use by the player. It just makes a hell of a lot more sense for the player to throw a burn then stealth, and then cause a blind when they are again targetable. The blind-then-burn sequence makes the ability awkward, even though it’s a rather nice ability.

3. Mind Stab.

The animation lock on this ability is atrocious. I understand that the animation intuitively mandates that the player stand still, but the duration where you are locked in the spot is insane for the fluidity of combat in GW2. The strangest part is that I seem to be able to animation cancel it sometimes but not others. The animation on this ability could do with some tuning for sure.

1. Learn to time your shatters. Shatter when your cooldowns for more clones and phantasms is about to be up, so you can resummon them. Using this method, you can achieve very little phantasm downtime while still bringing shatter effects to the table.

2. If you don’t trait for shatters, you will obviously have less effect using shatters.

3. Illusory Persona is god.

4. Shatters could use some minor tuning. Mostly in terms of the illusions reaching the target in a slightly more consistent manner.

Edit:

In my opinion, when players get more experience and practice at using and maximizing the Mesmer class, shatter builds will become much more prevalent, and shattering in general will become more common in all builds, including maximum phantasm builds.

If you do not trait for shatters, then shatters won’t do a huge amount for you beyond the moderate utility.

If you trait for shatters, they can be very effective as a significant tool.

For my two specs I use Berserker (power set) or Carrion (shatter set).

I would use mostly Rampager if I had Sharper Images spec that I wanted to gear for.

Shatter more often and stop being lazy.

I find Pistol to be the weakest offhand.

OH Sword is categorically stronger for raw power builds.

Focus is stronger for utility outside of a duel, and with Warden’s Feedback it is universally stronger.

Torch is meh in general, but is actually very effective for one of my builds. Wish they would swap the burn/blind on Prestige and have the iMage cast 2 stacks of Confusion, perhaps with a shorter duration (6s?). The iMage casts pretty fast — it is currently underrated.

The only thing Pistol is good for is Sharper Images spamming, which is a highly passive spec.

Howdy, I use a large monitor that has a native resolution of 2560 × 1600. The only other “natural” resolution is 1280 × 800, which is kind of meh. Any resolution in between shows up a bit blurry.

However, the UI size is tiny at 2560×. Is there any way to increase the UI scale past “larger”, which just isn’t large enough?